Peter Hutchinson
PETER HUTCHINSON
SUMMER THROWN ROPES
JULY 23 - SEPTEMBER 20, 2025
GAA COLOGNE
Gaa is pleased to present Summer Thrown Ropes, a solo exhibition of work by Peter Hutchinson spanning from the 1960s to 2000s. Summer Thrown Ropes is Hutchinson’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, and the first presentation of the late artist’s work since his passing in June 2025. Across his decades-long career, Hutchinson demonstrated a persistent interest in the natural world. A pioneer of the Narrative Art and Earth and Land Art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Hutchinson continuously explored the intersection of humanity and the natural world, as documented through his works comprised of photographs, collage, and text. Summer Thrown Ropes highlights works of Hutchinson’s which pay tribute to the mountains, the valleys, the coastline, the ocean, and the terrestrial and aquatic life so integral to the vibrancy and the viability of the world around us all.
In particular, the works included in Summer Thrown Ropes speak to the rich biodiversity and lush natural abundance brought on by the verdant summer season. Taking its name from Hutchinson’s canonical Thrown Ropes series, the exhibition offers compositions from this body of work alongside pieces which further exude the artist’s inquisitive nature and perceptive eye. Part action and intervention, part documentation and recording, Hutchinson’s works often originate conceptually with his own physical engagement with his surroundings, his transient, site-specific impressions on the environment subsequently catalogued through photography and hand-written text. Through the physical act of throwing large lengths of rope to form random, organic lines – both above ground and under water – Hutchinson creates a serpentine blueprint upon which he plants flowers, strings fruits or vegetables, or marks the land, resulting in serpentine patterns that shift over time.
Enacted across various environments, these interventions show Hutchinson’s veritable understanding of the dynamic essence of the natural world and the multifaceted impact humans might make on it, as evinced through this statement, written by Hutchinson in 1969 for Arts Magazine and quoted in the press release for his dual exhibition Ocean Projects: Hutchinson and Oppenheim at the Museum of Modern Art in New York:
“Since this planet became solid there have been constant changes in its surface. Geologic eras, meteoritic assaults, floods, storms and erosion have constantly built up, torn down, pitted, smoothed and otherwise sculpted its face....Artists today are...taking their cues from meteoritic craters and volcanic pits as well as dams, burial mounds, aqueducts, fortifications and moats, to build works that change the surface of the earth. These latest works, however, differ from what went before in that their intent is abstract and intentionally artistic....The connection between agriculture, earthworks, and landscaping is clear. The intelligent use of vegetation in landscape has long been considered an art and often followed ideas taken from paintings. It is only logical that the artist should turn back to the landscape and do it himself in actuality rather than as an illusory plan in a painting…”
A long-time resident of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Hutchinson’s reverence for the seaside oasis is evidenced by works such as Stone Thrown Rope, 1991, which records his ephemeral lithic intervention on the sandy surf. Despite their weight, the inevitable ubiquity of the tide renders the physical presence of the stones temporary, their density no match for the drag and drift of the current. The sovereignty of the sea is once again underscored in Rosa Rugosa, 1975, in which Hutchinson alludes to the connectivity provided through the currents, which enabled the arrival of the ‘beach rose’ on the East Coast from its native Asian shores.
Perhaps Hutchinson captures the sentiments of awe, wonder, angst, and trepidation best in Noah’s Menagerie, 1999, from his Alliterative Animal Landscape Series. Beneath an imagined landscape boasting cerulean skies and sapphire-blue seas abounding with a parade of flora and fauna, Hutchinson’s hand-written caption reads:
“Now, many narrations multiply. New momentums near. Mankind never measures nature’s mobility, nor makes necessary motions. Never mind.”
The wonder of Hutchinson’s works exists in their sensitivity, their transience. Rather than assert permanence, his interventions, whether submerged strings of flowers or stones surrendered to the tide, embrace impermanence as both subject and medium. In doing so, Hutchinson invites us to witness beauty in its most fleeting form: art that lives briefly, simultaneously moves with and changes an environment, and ultimately disappears, leaving only a trace in memory or photograph.
Peter Hutchinson (b. 1930, London, England; d. 2025, Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA) lived and worked in Provincetown, MA, where for over 55 years he was a master gardener and process photographer, creating work that explores the layered, interrelated qualities of nature and language.
Hutchinson’s passion for the natural world and horticulture galvanized his ceaseless exploration of the earth and his surroundings, referencing and combining source materials such as photographs, collage, and text to yield a distinctively new and inherently personal narrative space.
The Estate of Peter Hutchinson will remain dedicated to celebrating the innovation, accomplishment, and legacy of his life’s practice through the continued advocacy of his work. Gaa is honored to have shared such a beautiful, collaborative relationship with Hutchinson since the inception of the gallery, and will forever cherish the friendship that always extended beyond the walls of the gallery space itself.
Hutchinson was the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Hutchinson has exhibited his work extensively in the United States and abroad, including recent solo exhibitions at Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA, USA; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, USA; Frac Bretagne, Rennes, France; Pompidou, Metz, France; Arp Museum, Rolandseck, Germany; and Stadel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Basel, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.